An Introduction to “Writing Language, Writing Sound”

What does it mean to compose text-driven music? Can musicians read language the way they would a traditional musical score? Can the poet use language sonically as well as metaphorically? These are the questions that are constantly at play in my work as a composer-poet, questions I feel can be of great use to the poet, spoken-word artist, or composer interested in working with language¹.

To offer an invitation to grapple with language and sound as a unified form I’ll take a very brief look at the opening of Nathaniel Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 136”:

A comped piano lifted the leaves in
    Low Forest, a blanket of shade pulled
up, a sheet of glass put in place, free
                                                         pros-
    pect all around I thought. I wanted my
allegoric lapse, I wanted my whatsaid
  companions. Alone looking out under
                                                               house
      arrest, I wanted them back, less myself
   than before, unbeset...    An exquisite jewel
    it all was, no explanation, no equation,
                                                                  a
   time-lapse excursion it was.

To begin, I engage with poetry on the level of tempo—tempo as disconnected from the notion of the speed at which we read. These opening lines do not present a sense of slowness: the lines are relatively short, word choice simple, and there is a sense of preparation, of forward motion in the story itself. Neither is there a swift pulse underlining these lines as clarified in what I think of as the melody. There are very few short, hard consonants in favor of an overwhelming amount of “sss” and “shh” sounds, “a SHeet of glaSS put in plaCE, free/proS/pect all around I thought … … … time-lapSE eXcurSion it waS”. These are not easy sounds to jump over and require us to linger a bit longer with each line. These lines ask of us to sit a moment in this solitude without losing the propulsion toward the “exquisite jewel.” 

I invite you now to give this poem the gift of your voice. Read these opening lines out loud while snapping your finger or tapping your foot to what feels to you like a medium tempo. Read the lines very slowly and then again very quickly while keeping (as best you can!) that steady medium beat. Then read out loud at whatever a normal pace is for your voice while tapping out a very slow or very fast beat. What will hopefully become clear is that no matter the speed you read at, the underlying and inherent tempo to Mackey’s writing is always present. 

Through this work we come to understand that spoken word performance is not merely the reading of a poem out loud, it is the full expression of what already exists in a poem on the page. What we have just done, albeit in an extremely truncated way, is read lines of poetry as a musical composition. These are frames to help us read, perform, and compose our own work. These are places to write from, which is to say these are ways of hearing the world we try to capture in our poetry. Go back now and reread Mackey’s opening stanzas and see how much more of the language, the meaning, the imagery, the emotion you are able to cull from the language after you’ve spent time learning the music of it. Then go write, go sing, go listen to the music you have to compose through your poetry.